View and control your PC's startup programs with this straightforward open source tool

Every time your PC starts, a host of programs launch along with Windows, extending your boot time and gobbling up valuable system resources. But if you'd like to know more, don't worry - Startup Master can help.

Just launching it immediately provides a detailed view of your startup programs, for instance: the program name, location, where it's started from (the Startup folder, a Registry key), whether the program exists, even an indication of whether each program can be trusted (perhaps useful for picking up malware).

You may still see startup programs you don't recognise, of course. But if you right-click something, select Search Internet, then a browser window will open with the results of a search for that program name, telling you much more about what it does.

If you spot programs which are surplus to requirements then you're able to disable them, or delete them from the startup list entirely.

A "Delay" option will by default wait a couple of minutes to launch a particular start program, which could help to accelerate your system boot.

And if you know what you're doing then you can edit the startup program list manually, for instance moving the startup reference from one Registry key to another.

Startup Master isn't the most powerful startup program manager around, and its delay option is particularly basic. It is easy to use, though, and might be of interest if you're more interested in basic reporting, disable and deletion-type functionality.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI